Jessica Ramirez restocks shelves at the City Target store in S.F. as the holiday shopping season is set to get under way.

Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

Jessica Ramirez restocks shelves at the City Target store in S.F....

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Children wait to participate in a ballet demonstration with S.F. Ballet dancers at Westfield Centre in S.F.

Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle

Children wait to participate in a ballet demonstration with S.F....

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Ballerina Miranda Dafoe (left) and other San Francisco Ballet dancers demonstrate their form at the downtown S.F. Westfield Centre, which is offering entertainment to entice shoppers.

Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle

Ballerina Miranda Dafoe (left) and other San Francisco Ballet...

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Sienna Navaro, center, and others play in the fake snow that fell at the end of the light show and ballet demonstration. In a bid to lure people away from online shopping for the holidays, the Westfield Centre in downtown San Francisco is holding hourly evening light shows called "Illuminique" under the dome of the rotunda. Thursday November 15th, 2012.

Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle

Sienna Navaro, center, and others play in the fake snow that fell...

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Shelves are stocked at the City Target store in San Francisco in preparation for the start of the holiday shopping season.

Like shoppers jostling to grab the best Black Friday bargains, retailers are gearing up to fight over a limited pool of consumer dollars as the holiday shopping season kicks off this week, bringing to the battle new tactics such as ever-earlier opening hours, in-store entertainment and mobile promotions.

The average consumer expects to spend $749.51 on gifts and other holiday items, up from the $740.57 in 2011, according to a survey by the National Retail Federation. The group forecasts total holiday sales at $586.1 billion, up 4 percent from 2011. The number of people who plan to shop on Black Friday weekend, though, has decreased slightly to 147 million, compared with 152 million last year, the retail organization reported.

Not only are they competing for slices of a pie that is barely growing, but brick-and-mortar retailers continue to lose market share to online-only stores such as Amazon. Forrester Research predicted that online holiday sales will total $68.4 billion, up 15 percent from 2011.

Online tax

This year for the first time, Californians will have to pay sales tax for Black Friday purchases they make online, but it's not clear if that will send many would-be online shoppers into stores, said Kirthi Kalyanam, who is director of the Retail Management Institute at Santa Clara University.

Avoiding sales tax wasn't the only thing people liked about online shopping. Surveys show that shoppers prize deals above all else, and online retailers are often able to beat brick-and-mortar stores on price. A recent analysis by Bloomberg Industries showed that Amazon beats Walmart, Target and other chain stores on toy prices, for instance.

So stores are bringing out the big competitive guns for this important shopping day, when 10 to 15 percent of the holiday season's revenue typically is banked. They're opening on Thanksgiving Day before the dinner dishes are dry; they're staggering doorbuster events throughout the four-day weekend; and they're making use of all possible channels to reach shoppers, including the store, the website and, increasingly, mobile devices. Then there are the sales before the sale - the "pre-Black Friday" events running all week.

"You're going to see deals leading up to Black Friday that may, in fact, even be better than a Black Friday deal," said Edgar Dworsky, who runs the website ConsumerWorld.org.

Holiday hours

Walmart and Sears stores will open at 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving, and Target will open at 9 p.m. - all hours earlier than last year's openings, which were in turn earlier than those in years past. Considering that some stores typically have lines building for hours in advance of openings, hitting one of these openings to get limited-availability doorbusters could seriously cut into traditional holiday time.

"Retailers are trying to figure out how close they can get" to Thanksgiving dinner, Kalyanam said. "Eight o'clock seems like the limit, when you've finished the dishes and are supposed to sit down. I'd be very curious to see if they can push it any farther."

Dworsky, a longtime Black Friday shopper, called the Thanksgiving night openings "terrible" because they cut into family time - and he's not the only one complaining. More than 60 petitions have been started on Change.org to protest retail workers having to clock in on the holiday, said spokeswoman Charlotte Hill.

One of them, started by Casey St. Clair, a Target employee in Corona (Riverside County), was one of the fastest-growing petitions on the site last week with more than 200,000 signatures. It asks Target to "take the high road and save Thanksgiving for employees like me and our families by saying no to 'Thanksgiving Creep.' "

Responding to demand

Kathy Grannis, spokeswoman for the National Retail Federation, said stores are merely responding to growing shopper demand for Thanksgiving-night openings.

"We know that 24 percent of holiday shoppers were at stores by midnight last year. That number had grown from 9 percent the previous year," Grannis said. And, she added, it's not as if having to work on Thanksgiving was unheard of for workers in other industries.

"Service, manufacturing, public transportation ... (and) football players have to go to work on Thanksgiving," she said.

Besides staying open for longer hours, retailers are tweaking their events to encourage customers to stay in the store longer and to spread the crowds out across the hours.

Walmart, for example, will have some deals available when doors open at 8, but then it will begin an electronics event at 10 p.m. during which several low-price gift items will go on sale and be guaranteed to be in stock for one hour. More doorbuster sales will become available at 5 a.m. on Black Friday.

Toys R Us also has several doorbuster events staggered throughout the weekend. Whether that trend will continue depends on whether the returns make up for the increased planning, printing and labor costs required to operate several Black Friday sales instead of just one, Kalyanam said.

"It's a lot of work for retailers," he said.

Fighting competition

Stores are fighting competition from online-only retailers by giving special treats to shoppers who show up. Toys R Us, for the first time, will give goody bags to the first shoppers in line. The first 200 people at each store will get a bag full of stocking stuffers worth $30.

In San Francisco, Westfield San Francisco Centre will host hourly Cirque du Soleil performances from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Black Friday. Chris Mann of the TV hit "The Voice" will sing at Macy's tree lighting in Union Square at 6 p.m. that evening.

All this is in addition to tactics stores are already using to fight showrooming, the popular practice of using stores merely as a place to check out a product that you intend to buy online. Both showrooming and aggressive price comparison have become major forces for retailers to contend with now that so many shoppers are equipped with smartphones, with apps that scan bar codes and pull up prices from competitors both online and in the neighborhood.

One way stores are fighting back is by offering more exclusive products that shoppers can't buy elsewhere. This fall, Toys R Us debuted a store-brand tablet computer for kids, the $149.99 Tabeo.

Price matching

Smartphone-wielding customers have pushed stores to expand price-matching offers. Target will now match prices from certain online competitors' websites during the holiday season, in addition to matching prices in competitors' print ads. However, Target is suspending its online price matching offer during Black Friday weekend.

Stores are also turning the mobile phones in shoppers' hands to their advantage with store-branded mobile apps - and more stores are rolling out special Black Friday services and promotions through those apps. Twenty-nine percent of retailers say they'll send mobile alerts about Black Friday specials, up from 18 percent last year, the National Retail Federation reported.

"More than ever before, retailers are integrating mobile and digital promotions into what they're offering their shoppers for the holiday season," said the retail organization's Grannis.

Walmart is offering the chance to buy some doorbusters online on Thanksgiving before the store opens - exclusively to customers who download the store's mobile app, join the e-mail list or "like" the company on Facebook, said Walmart.com spokesman Ravi Jariwala.

Walmart, Macy's and other stores have integrated interactive store maps into their mobile apps, so users can click a Black Friday special and get directions to its location in the specific store they're in. The Macy's app will also notify shoppers of previously unadvertised deals on Black Friday, the store said.